A diminutive history of height: How being short has its disadvantages

A diminutive history of height: How being short has its disadvantages

Human beings, as a species, are taller than they have ever been.

When humanity’s primate ancestors rose up on their hind legs more than one million years ago, they stood a mere four feet off the ground – barely enough to peek over the savannah grasses covering their African home.

Now, the average male – in Canada, at least – is only three inches short of six feet. And, with lanky teens crowding high school classrooms, scientists expect we are only going to get taller.

In short, it is a bad time to be short.

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“Today, there remains one group that has made no progress in the face of rampant discrimination,” a spokesman with the U.S.-based National Organization of Short-Statured Adults, said in the 2008 Canadian documentary S&M, Short and Male.

Demographically, shorter has always been shorthand for unhealthy. The low doorways of colonial Quebec City and the miniature suits of armour in European museums remain as a relic of a brutish, less nutritious past. North Korean youth, it is often noted, are between one and three inches shorter than their better-fed South Korean counterparts.

Little wonder that the word’s tallest countries are also the world’s richest countries: Norway, Sweden, Germany and the United States are all in the top 20.

And in an era that has seen the evaporation of countless racial and gender stereotypes, short people are routinely portrayed in popular media as jealous, conniving liars.

Joe Pesci and Danny Devito, at 5’3” and 5’ respectively, have made careers out of playing homicidal maniacs, crooked cops and annoying neighbours.

Modern science has not helped the short cause. A 2006 study out of Princeton University concluded that tall people are smarter than their average-sized counterparts. A 2008 European study concluded that short people were more prone to jealousy. Two years ago, a study by the University of Helsinki concluded that short-statured people were 50% more likely to die prematurely of heart disease.

The corporate world’s preference for height is even more stark. Up to one third of Fortune 500 CEOs are taller than 6’3”, a circumstance shared by only 2% of men. In 2003, a pair of University of Florida researchers crunched the numbers and figured out that taller people earn $789 more per year, per inch.

In 1977, the canon of short-statured slurs was summed up in Randy Newman’s novelty hit, Short People, in which the singer relentlessly assailed short people for being lying criminals with “grubby little fingers.”

Rather than a concerted hate anthem, however, the song is a classic Newman attempt to poke fun at prejudice.

Plenty did not get the joke, and several threats later, Mr. Newman (6’) has since grown to despise his creation.

“It was too bad that was my one big hit,” he said in 2003.

The most pervasive short people myth remains the Napoleon complex. First coined by Austrian psychotherapist Alfred Adler, it posits that short people will be overly aggressive and domineering in order to compensate for small stature.

The complex’s name alone is a misnomer. At 5’6”, the French emperor Napoleon was actually slightly taller than the average Frenchman of the period. The myth appears to have been fed by Napoleon’s penchant of only appearing in public surrounded by his gargantuan Imperial Guard.

In a bizarre study conducted five years ago by the U.K.’s University of Central Lancashire, men of different heights were set to duel with wooden chopsticks – with one of the dueling partners instructed to deliberately provoke the other by rapping him across the knuckles.

Researchers found that it was the taller volunteers who were more likely to lose their temper. “The results were consistent with the view that Small Man Syndrome is a myth,” researcher Mike Eslea told the BBC, adding that the myth likely persists because people are more likely to remember encountering a short jerk than a tall one.

Recent French president Nicholas Sarkozy was actually one inch shorter than his 19th century counterpart. Like many short people, he was often accused of disguising his height with hidden platforms, raised heels or carefully selected entourages of shorter people.

With relationships and careers literally at stake, Mr.Sarkozy would not be alone in that regard. Elevator shoes, specially fitted clothing and even special “height-increasing” stretch routines continue to make a swift business.

Actor Tom Cruise is surprisingly small at 5’7”, but is kept in his role as an appropriately tall leading man thanks to a wide tool chest of cinematic tricks.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was a surprisingly diminutive 5’5”. With one of history’s largest propaganda machines at his command, however, the dictator simply decreed that he always be depicted in paintings and sculptures as a towering father figure.

Ironically, it was from the darkest reaches of Stalinist Russia that a relatively unknown doctor devised the most radical height-altering procedure to date.

In Northern Siberia in 1951 Dr. Gavriil Ilizarov cobbled together old bike parts to pioneer the Ilizarov technique. Colloquially known as “limb lengthening,” it is an excruciatingly painful procedure that uses bracing to gradually force apart a patient’s femur.

S&M, Short and Male, showcased Canadian teen Akash Shukla, who underwent what he called the “unimaginable pain” of the $275,000, six-month procedure to raise his height from 4’11.5” to 5’2”.

“He’s going through pain either way,” his father Rahul says in the film. “If you go ahead with the surgery, there is much more severe pain, but only for six months.”